After that post went up, some of the comments in the Twittersphere and on Facebook brought up the theory that this is a publicity stunt geared around the upcoming collaboration beer noted in the article.

Without being local to the San Diego market, we were lacking some context on Ryan Reschan’s past relationship with Stone Brewing Company. Until we did a search of his Twitter feed and saw that he has reviewed several beers including Lukcy Basartd…which he gives an A-. He also notes liking the other Bastard beers (Update I: and a quick run through some samples of other Stone video reviews of his are A’s and a B+).

That warranted a call to Stone HQ where we laid out the publicity stunt possibility and a spokesperson for the company did confirm that they are “doing some fun things with the videos” we linked to in the other post.

Expect another shoe to drop at some point here with the beer release coming soon.

@Jeff Any blogger/journalist/publisher worth their salt will take the phrase provided as confirmation [edit: in this context]. Wouldn’t expect a company to outright say “Yes, it is a publicity stunt.” But if someone accuses you of something (or asks the question), you generally say “No,” which didn’t happen here. I could have asked a better question like, “Did you collaborate in any way on the content in the videos?” Wouldn’t be surprising to see backtracking / denial on some level once they’ve had time to think up a plan and hope it goes away. It’s unpredictable at this point.

“Eric on July 17, 2013 at 3:09 am said:
Not hard to rig at all. How many Coconut IPAs were there? Not hard to pick it out, especially if everyone knows you’ve submitted such a beer and you are well known.”

Did you even try the beer, or are you just assuming the worst out of some sort of jealousy and/or prior Stone hate?